ICO Analysis: IOV

2018/11/27/ 13:30

Although it is not extremely hard for tech-savvy people to get familiar with different blockchains, wallets, and exchanges, newcomers usually find all these quite complicated and troublesome. To keep his or her crypto-assets safe, one needs to create different wallets for every blockchain and performing transactions between wallets of the same chain is not exactly a pleasant experience as public keys acting as wallet addresses are quite long, hard to memorize and all these can lead to the common human error of sending these assets to wrong addresses.

Due to most blockchains’ immutable and irreversible nature, once such an error is committed, one has a very small chance to get his or her assets back.

Indeed, surveys conducted among cryptocurrency users seem to agree with this line of reasoning. It is estimated that around 30% of the total BTC created are lost forever due to human errors and almost 95% of survey attendants acknowledge that they feel anxiety while sending crypto-assets. To solve these two important issues of the crypto-verse, the IOV team introduces two products, Blockchain Communication Protocol (BCP) and Blockchain Name Service (BNS).

Blockchain Communication Protocol enables the IOV platform users to keep their assets of different blockchains in the same place, removing the need to use several wallets. Thanks to this protocol, initially disconnected blockchains now can interoperate and users can exchange one crypto-asset of a blockchain with another of a different blockchain as the protocol allows cross-chain atomic swaps.

As this does not remove the problem of randomized public keys and the possibility of human error of sending assets to wrong addresses, Blockchain Name Service solves the second problem by providing a customizable naming service for wallets. These human-readable addresses, for instance, isabella*iov.value, will replace traditional value addresses, for instance, 17Rts7fvY9Co2kja4DirzAbFX57j858yfx, and make it much easier for users to send funds with a lower margin of error. It is also possible for blockchain entrepreneurs to create their projects in an easier way, thanks to the deployment tools and templates available to the person of interest.

All one needs to do in order to benefit from all these services that the IOV team provides is to use the user-friendly IOV wallet.

Token

The IOV token is used to pay the fees to create a new entity or transfer the ownership of a blockchain name or a value address name in the Blockchain Name Service. Staking IOV tokens is required to be a validator.

The token sale is conducted in three stages. In the first two stages of the pre-sale, contributors are asked to pay €0.08 and €0.09 per token respectively. As the public sale price is determined to be €0.10, the ICO investor should not worry about these low discounts which are provided to early contributors.

Although the IOV team is planning to move to their own native blockchain later, IOV tokens will be initially ERC-20 tokens and later will be swapped with native tokens. That is to say that the ICO investor should keep up him- or herself with the news and not miss the swap period.IOV tokens will be minted based on demand, meaning that there is not a pre-determined number of IOV tokens to be created and thus there will be no unsold tokens. The team is planning to have the following token distribution:

- The project is led by the former chief system architect of Lisk, Isabelle Dell, and an ex-senior software engineer of Tendermint, Ethan Frey. (+3)- As there are not many projects with similar goals, the competition is low. (+2)- If the project gets popular among newbie crypto-investors, a network effect is possible. (+2)- Low bonuses provided to early token sale contributors prevents an immediate dump upon listing on exchanges. (+2)

Disposition

Two problems that newbie crypto-currency investors face are that they have to create new wallets for each blockchain, keeping their public and private keys safe. Another is the common error of inputting a wrong address while sending crypto-assets due to complicated public keys. IOV’s Blockchain Name Service and Blockchain Communication Protocol enable these investors to keep their funds in one single wallet and customize their wallet addresses, making it less troublesome and easier to avoid human error. The project is founded by experienced blockchain developers such as Lisk’s Isabelle Dell and Tendermint’s Ethan Frey.

The absence of projects with similar goals means that IOV will not meet much competition and that it might find itself quite popular in the case of widespread public adoption. Still, a hard-cap of €25,000,000 can be considered too high for this project. It is also extremely possible that the IOV wallet will not find the expected popularity among experienced crypto-currency investors who already got used to dealing with different wallets and complicated wallet addresses. IOV receives a 6/10.